Simple Metrics Collector, a refresher

What’s new with the Simple Metrics Collector? In short, nothing yet. And that’s a good thing! It means that the code does exactly what it’s supposed to do — nothing more, nothing less. And we haven’t found any bugs yet, so activity on the code repository has been minimal. Don’t worry, we are still working behind the scenes to add more features. More on that in a moment.

As a refresher, let’s review what the Simple Metrics Collector does.

It uses the Piwik Javascript library
to capture user-behavior metrics on a dynamically generated web page. Google Analytics can’t do this because it only captures metrics related to URL hits. If the user interacts with your page in a way that doesn’t change the URL, those activities are invisible to most other analytics solutions.

Simple Metrics Collector sends those metrics to middleware and stores it in Cloudant
. Piwik code (client and service) is open source, but if you want to store the data in Cloudant instead of the Piwik service — either maintained by you or by the paid cloud service
— you can use this code to store it in Cloudant. This makes the data available for broader analytics, especially if you use Cloudant on IBM Bluemix
, where you can use Cloudant in conjunction withour Spark service to run big data analytics or build a web app to visualize the data.

What’s next?

The client-side code is in great shape, but if you’d like to see it capture more metrics, like browser window size, running scripts, or something else, get in touch on Slack
. Or, better yet, fork the code
and submit a pull request.

Upcoming work on the project will focus on the data visualization side of things. Be on the lookout for improvements to the user experience and look-and-feel of the charts we produce. So, until next time, happy data logging.